


the vicious circle turns

by vaudelin



Series: supernatural codas [7]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Related, M/M, Post-Episode: s13e07 War of the Worlds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-06 21:38:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12826638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaudelin/pseuds/vaudelin
Summary: It’s not like they’ve spoken about it, not like they’ve said it aloud, but Dean thought they were both coming at it differently, this time. Making something between them that might stay.





	the vicious circle turns

Not even a week has passed in his latest return to life before Castiel finds himself bound again. He hardly has the chance to speak with Jack, to get to know him and to assure him that he is loved, before Castiel upsets the balance enough to drive Jack away.

Whatever time they had, it hadn’t been enough. Now Castiel has ruined it all again.

Time passes without increment, here, with only the activity outside his cage assuring Castiel that he is not trapped in an endless moment like in the Empty. He paces, or sometimes presses his brow to the bars of his cell. Lucifer talks, but then Lucifer is always talking. None of what he says is useful enough for Castiel to care.

Instead, Castiel keeps his interest pricked toward the main chambers, catching what details he can from Asmodeus’ minions chittering amongst themselves. News regarding Jack remains sparse, but their plans are ever-evolving. Castiel knows that Hell is closing in; he hopes Sam and Dean are quicker on the draw.

Beyond Lucifer’s insipid droning, Castiel has only Asmodeus himself for company. Between the two he would prefer to stick to Lucifer, and solely because Asmodeus’ presence promises a double-edged proximity to Dean. He comes only when one of Dean’s texts has vexed him, and otherwise that piece of Castiel’s life remains withheld until Asmodeus tires again of feigning his replies.

“How on earth do you stomach these mindless messages?” Asmodeus drones, holding Castiel’s phone like an inscrutable tablet to decypher. He waves Castiel over without looking and turns around the screen. “Two calls and six texts so far today. Your boy’s acting like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”

Castiel approaches the bars because he has no choice. Dean is his only lifeline to the outside world, and Asmodeus does not often allow him the luxury of helping craft a text response. Castiel reads over Dean’s messages, a sinking feeling growing at the glimpse provided into his mental state. Dean sounds odd but unsuspicious, sending mostly idle anecdotes that either he finds interesting or he thinks Castiel might.

Asmodeus pulls back the screen. “Now what do I send to cease this frivolity?”

Castiel recites a fact about honeybees that Dean most likely knows by now, considering how annoyed Dean gets whenever he brings them up. He gives the details wrong to Asmodeus, though, hoping small hints might be enough to set off Dean’s alarms.

“How fares the hunt for Jack?” Castiel asks, when Asmodeus hangs back, typing his response.

Asmodeus glances up, his mouth bent in a crooked smile. He waggles the phone. “It fares well, in no small part thanks to this rube. Good to know what the enemy is doing—and boy, does your boy pour out updates like a sieve.” He gives a departing leer, tipping his brow in mock salute.

Castiel aches. This stasis cannot last forever; Asmodeus will grow soon bored of Dean and will cut off him for good, and here Castiel will remain, the idiot who ran off after a moment scarcely spent alone with Dean, filled to the brim with want without having the courage yet to say.

Lucifer has some annoying quip to offer, in the aftermath, but Castiel misses it. The bars don’t seem strong enough to steady him anymore.

* * *

Jack had known that leaving his family would hurt more than anything he has ever felt, but he had known that he would survive it too. It was the only truth that enabled him to follow through with his chance to flee.

He tries not to think of what he left behind, focusing instead on what might be gained. Distance, introspection and insight. Enough space to work through what it means to try your best and still repeatedly fail.

Jack knows he is both an abomination and a miracle, depending on who asks after him. He is supposed to bring about paradise, to be an arbiter of greatness. He tries, but he was meant to be so much _more_ than what he is.

On his own, Jack takes to learning his abilities in increments, observing the world as he goes. Travel and motion; light and sound. Food and music and dirt and rain. Jack pushes himself through teleportation, testing it again and again until infinitesimal moments stretch out toward infinity, sensations lingering the longer he steps outside the known reaches of time.

The space between seconds brings with it a deep, calming sense of peace. Not that Jack was unhappy with the Winchesters, only that their world seems so… small, now that he’s stepped outside of it. He has all of infinity outstretched before him, here.

Here, the universe hangs in abstract. The earth and the space it occupies unfurls around him in shapes unrecognizable to mankind. Its colours and hums and thrums of life hang within reach, quiet but distant, far enough away to let Jack breathe.

The earth is so busy. More complicated than he could have ever presumed. So much remains outside his experience, the knowledge and consequences that his mother hadn’t thought to teach him, the lifetimes humanity has accumulated that Jack has yet to understand.

It seemed so simple, at first, the cut of right and wrong made by a steady hand. But if that is true, then how has the world filled so full with suffering? And if Jack has done wrong, then how can he justify continuing to live when he will only hurt more people? How can any of them carry on knowing they will assuredly bring others pain?

Jack extends a hand through the aether, toward the blur of the earth that riots around him. He dips his fingers through a whirl of yellow and grey that sparks his curiosity—the clash of life within the swirl calls to him, and as he reaches out to it he finds himself suddenly at rest.

Jack stands on the sidewalk along a busy street. Vehicles growl and prowl the clogged intersection beside him, the honking cars interspersed with people too preoccupied to wait.

Snow falls gently through the evening air. Slush soaks the bottom of his jeans. Jack breathes in, eyes closed, and listens for the thrum that drew him here, that soft ache of a wound that throbs in tandem with his own.

It isn’t often Jack finds his own kin in a stranger. He needs to know what brand of suffering its owner houses.

The feeling leads him down wet roads where pedestrians walk with bowed heads. Jack hunches his shoulders against the cold, mimicking the people around him. He pauses at crosswalks, eyeing the lights that shine brightly off the asphalt. His heart pulls him on a sudden tug left, and he finds himself pushing open the door to a cafe, a small bell ringing overhead. The warm air within sets his face aglow.

A man approaches him, asking if he’d like a table, but Jack pays him only half-attention. He points out a young woman, sitting on her own by the window. The man makes assumptions and leaves Jack on his way.

The woman is not surprised when he takes a seat across from her. She glances up at him through the candlelight. Her coffee cup comes up, tilts, and slowly comes down. Her phone screen dims. The air around her crackles in a way Jack cannot describe. He wonders what she is waiting to say.

“I’ve been expecting you,” she tells him, still staring at her cup. She shrugs. “Expecting nothing good, at least. Seems to be the way.”

Jack doesn’t know how to respond. He rubs his hands together beneath the table, then tucks them beneath his thighs. “Do you know me?”

“No.”

“Then do you know why I’m here?”

“No,” she says. “But I can guess.”

Jack bows his head. He thinks a long while on what should come next. “Am I… a bad presence? Is that what you sensed?”

It seems reasonable, if she were expecting something awful. But Jack has been holding his breath outside of time; he shouldn't have been able to be sensed.

The woman glances at the window, her hand folded beneath her chin. She gives a low sigh that sinks her shoulders by an increment. “I think we’re all bad.”

“Then what’s the point?” he blurts. He cannot help it; the question has been bugging him since the moment he was born.

“The point?” She snorts, rolling her eyes. “Do more good than harm. Or at least try.”

“But what if I can’t…” Jack trails off, frustrated. “When I hurt somebody, it’s much worse than what regular people can do.”

“Same here, kid,” the woman replies, quiet but with teeth. “We all have our burdens to bear.”

Jack squirms, untucking his hands. He folds them nervously on the table. “I don’t know what brought me here. I just thought… You felt the same.”

She pushes her half-finished cup away. A server catches her eye, and she flashes for a refill. “Yeah, I do. But so does everybody else. We’re all stuck inside our own heads, magnifying our mistakes until they’re all we can see. And if that’s all you’re looking for, then that’s all you’ll find.”

Jack pauses. “What have you done that makes you so sure?”

She smiles, looking wistful. Her sharp edges soften; he must have caught her with a quiet thought. “We all die at altars of our own making, Jack. So choose which obsessions will guide you, and let other people stop them from consuming you. That’s about the best any of us can make.”

The server pours a fresh cup, and the woman goes back to looking at her phone.

Jack takes his cue and bids her leave, stepping outside. The cold air wraps around him, quiet and still. Snow falls on his face and clings to his hair. Jack tips back his head, looking for stars that are not there, before slipping again into the night sky.

* * *

Dean fields the last phone call with a frown, his screen blinking the ended connection back up at him. A week’s worth of hunters have emptied their calls into the hotline and still no workable news about Jack has come from it. Sam keeps the lines open, branching feelers out to communities as outstretched as Gatineau and Guadalajara. Jody calls them once with a lead that turns out to be a non-starter, but otherwise there’s still nothing to show about their missing kid.

What Dean finds worse, somehow, is that Cas has fallen back to old patterns, now that he’s insisting on following his hunches alone without bringing Dean for backup. Dean tries to show trust in Cas’ decisions, tries to crawl out across a slab of patience a scant inch thick, but Cas hasn’t been alive long enough this time for Dean to accept how these old habits might stick. Not when it’s this kind of go-it-alone attitude that’s gotten Cas into trouble before.

Dean sets down the hotline and picks up his personal cell. His thumb hangs over the history log, running through the lopsided count of outgoing calls. Too much red lies in wait there but fuck it, what’s one more notch against him. His thumb drops and the call counts down, waiting for attention on the other side.

Cas answers this time, miraculously. Dean tilts his chin up, pushing his relief beyond the receiver’s range. “Hey man, what’s happening? Thought you were going to be gone at most a couple days.”

“I know, Dean. I’m sorry,” Cas’ voice says, scratchy and low. “This lead is proving more fruitful than I expected.”

“Yeah? So tell me about it. Me and Sammy can get some research going for whatever it is.” Dean hates being cooped up instead of out handling a case, but he’d take anything right now over spinning his wheels.

“It’s not like that,” Cas’ voice says, vague. “I’ll give updates when I can, but in the meantime just…”

“Hang tight,” Dean finishes for him. “Yeah, I get it,” he adds, even though he doesn’t. It’s not like they’ve spoken about it, not like they’ve said it aloud, but Dean thought they were both coming at it differently, this time. Making something between them that might stay.

“Thank you,” Cas’ voice tells him, sounding strangely relieved. Strange, because Dean can tell it’s coming not from what he said, but the implication that their conversation is about to end.

Cas shouldn’t be in a hurry to leave. He's never been before.

“Alright, you need to go,” Dean says. He’s thinking on his feet when he says, “Know I love you,” at the end, fighting hard to keep the waver from his voice.

“Love you too,” Cas’ voice purrs, like it’s nothing. Like it’s been said a hundred times before.

The call ends, and Dean’s hand trembles as he sets the phone down. His stomach roils, clenched tight around an unknowable and unshakeable fear. Dean marches into the kitchen using somebody else’s strength; surely it can’t be his.

“Sammy?” Dean says, voice shaky. He catches sight of Sam’s laptop, left open atop the table. But Sam is standing with his back to the door, turning back at him. A wide-eyed shock settles on Dean as he sees who’s standing across from him.

Jack. Back from the land of wherever, a recent arrival gauging by the surprised look mirrored on Sam’s face.

“I’m better,” Jack says quietly, as if it’s explanation enough for where he’s been. “I’ve thought about what happened and… I’d like to do better, with all of you. Because I do need your help to be good.”

“Jack, where have you—?” Sam begins, but Jack cuts him off.

“Where’s Castiel? I would like to apologise to him too.”

“That’s the thing,” Dean says, stepping in. “Sam, something’s wrong with Cas. These calls, they’re not…” Dean huffs. “It’s not him that’s answering.”

“How do you know?” Sam asks, frowning.

Dean blows out a breath, rubbing at his face. What can he say, without sounding crazy? Dean just knows through all the small gestures, those tiny measure that make up a person. Right now Cas’s actions tally up to it not being him. “I don’t know how I know it, it’s just not him.”

“Okay.” Sam nods, looking to Jack for agreement. “So if it’s not him, where is he instead?”

And isn’t that the question now.

* * *

Castiel closes his eyes, just as a gesture to pass the time, but when he opens them again the main chamber is ablaze.

No sense can be made, between the fire and the screaming, the sounds of a fight up ahead. Castiel rises for the bars, flexing back when they burn hot to the touch. Lucifer is babbling something in the cell beside him, but Castiel pays attention to the flash of silver blades through the smoke. A cone of warm light erupts and one of Asmodeus’ minions is thrown down the hall, sliding to rest in front of Castiel.

Castiel spies him first. “Jack!” he calls, reaching through the bars, heedless of how they burn.

Jack whips around, his lips parted as he pants, searching for Castiel through the smoke. His eyes glow golden, but when they land on him Jack’s gaze softens with a grin. “Father!”

Lucifer is talking, reaching out for him, but Jack marches straight for Castiel.

The bars wrench back from the walls, and Castiel steps out through the smoke to gather Jack into his arms. He checks Jack over, asks whether he is okay, did he come alone, but Jack takes his arm and waves him back down the hall, leading him to where Dean and Sam are holding back the hordes of hell.

“We need to go, now!” Sam yells, retreating with Dean at his side. Dean catches sight of Castiel and heads straight for him, clipping through the demons in his way.

“Beam us up, Scotty,” Dean shouts to Jack, wiping back the blood from his face. Jack responds dutifully, cutting a line of buttery light into the wall behind them.

Castiel casts an eye back to Lucifer’s cell, his expression curling with preemptive regret. “We need to bring him too.”

Dean curses up a storm, blocking any explanation Castiel would offer, but Jack wrenches open the cell as requested. Sam and him jump through the portal, with Dean pulling Castiel through shortly behind them. Castiel does not watch to see whether Lucifer manages to escape.

They land in a field twenty miles outside of Ponca City, Oklahoma, coming to rest in the grass in a helter-skelter pile of bruised limbs. Dean pulls Castiel’s face up to his own, tapping their brows roughly together.

“You okay?” Dean asks, breath panting across Castiel’s mouth. Castiel nods into him but Dean doesn’t let go, just rests his thumbs along the crests of his cheeks, his fingers running through Castiel’s hair. His eyes are wide and more frightened than Castiel has seen in ages, and all because of him.

Castiel sighs, dipping forward, apologies spilling out from him hot and quick. Dean wraps around him, mouth moving to the shell of Castiel’s ear as he offers back absolutions, the breadth of his body readily taking Castiel’s weight.

“No more stupid moves,” Dean tells him, reeling him in for a quick press of lips. Castiel nods into him, kissing him a second time, then a third, savouring the rasp of palm against his cheek before Dean is gripping him tightly again.

Sam helps them to their feet, eventually, and Jack makes a more focused effort to teleport them all outside the bunker. Castiel sees no evidence of Lucifer’s escape, but that means little. With Dean tight against him, shivering with worry and want, the problem of Michael can wait for another day.

**Author's Note:**

> also on [tumblr](https://vaudelin.tumblr.com/post/167884938548/the-vicious-circle-turns).


End file.
